  Y NOW, MOST of you have probably heard about the "crazy" in San Francisco who drove his black Honda SUV into 14 people, killing one. This wasn't an isolated incident last Tuesday, the unfortunates crossing at a single intersection, for instance. Twenty-nine year old Omeed Aziz Popal, just recently returned from Afghanistan, first struck and killed a man in the early afternoon before heading back out somewhat later to continue his spree.
There is no doubt that what Popal did was deliberate. One witness described hearing the Afghani scream "I'm a terrorist, I don't care" as San Francisco police led him away after his arrest. But according to a SF police spokesman, the series of attacks was not an act of terrorism, the same claim later affirmed by the department's command staff. No one has been able to answer, however, how such a conclusion could have been arrived at so quickly.
If this sounds eerily familiar, it is. Just last March, an Iranian immigrant drove an SUV into a crowd of people at the University of North Carolina, running over nine people. Despite the fact that this man boasted that "Allah gives permission in the Quran for the followers of Allah to attack those who have raged war against them..." and later sent a letter to a NC television station to reiterate his claim, Solomon Bradman, chief executive officer of the Miami-based Security Solutions International, commented that this attack didn't really look like an act of terrorism since, "he did a lousy job of it."
Maybe I didn't get the memo, but I didn't know that certain standards that had to be met - aside from the perp actually admitting his motive and his religion - in order to simply blow off an action that has all the signs of being an actual act of Islamofacist terrorism, with a lame comment. Was the benchmark somehow set on 9-11 that we have to have thousands of people die before it's actually called what it really is?
How about the attack last month by a lone gunman at the Jewish Federation Center in Seattle? I'll give you just one guess as to what the religion of this Pakistani is (HINT: Not a Quaker). Naveed Afzal Haq, whose father is the founding member of an Islamic center near Seattle, is...that's right, Muslim. Daddy's center is affiliated with Saudi-financed Wahhabist organizations, but we'll just ignore this additional bit of revealing info. The FBI has decided, instead, to call this incident a "hate crime," not an act of terrorism, adding that there was "nothing to indicate [that] he is part of a larger organization." I guess I missed the memo on this too, because apparently you must belong to a group (like a chess club?) in order to be declared a "terrorist."
Now I'm not a terrorism expert, by any means. I'd like to think that I can leave these sort of things to the experts to sort out, but there's something very unsettling when law enforcement officials and other governmental agencies who are supposed to be paying attention to all of this, connecting the dots if you will, try to instead play the "lone gunman" theory.
Daniel Pipes of the New York Sun calls these sudden acts of violence "Sudden Jihad Syndrome," a phrase he coined after Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar decided to run down people at the University of NC.
Sudden Jihad Syndrome is certainly a catchy little phrase, but let me narrow it down to what it really is... Islamofacist terrorism, and the people who are supposed to be protecting us from all of this had better start acknowledging that that is indeed what it is.
Nathan Tabor is a conservative political activist based in Kernersville, North Carolina. He has his BA in Psychology and his Master’s Degree in Public Policy. He is a contributing editor at http://www.theconservativevoice.com. Contact him at Nathan@nathantabor.com.More columns by Nathan Tabor
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